Category: Rants

Today was my first day back at work after being out all week with a particularly nasty bout of bronchitis. One of the joys of being married to an educator is the gifts they invariably bring home from the little walking bags of pus they call their students.

A trip to urgent care, an antihistamine that knocks me on my ass, and halfway through a z-pack later, I finally felt good enough to drag myself into the office today. One of my colleagues took a personal discretionary (i.e. mental health) day, and another is out (or at least working from home) for an unspecified length of time that may range as long as 4-6 weeks to care for his wife that had brain surgery last week. Good times!

My boss was naturally glad to hear that I was returning, because he had been hoping to take the afternoon off to spend some time with his son who is on spring break. And Elphaba gets very upset if there's no one in the office—even though everyone may be working.

I was greeted by 215 emails, 98% of which were totally irrelevent and quickly "marked as read." For better or worse, we are a good team, and when one or more of us is out, the others pitch in to keep the wheels of gub'mint turning.

But enough about that.

Warning: Geek Rant Ahead

As I mentioned earlier, I'm on a new liquid antihistamine that—while it does work quite well—is also prescribed as a sedative, a sleep-aid, and an anti-psychotic. I missed taking my first dose, but took one last night and its after-effects lingered all day. By mid afternoon I wanted nothing more than to go home and crawl into bed and nap.

Unfortunately, as my boss was leaving for the day he mentioned that a user was coming down at 4 pm to drop off her laptop for reimaging. It had some strange Office shit going on, and after all of us had looked at it and couldn't get it running correctly we decided to nuke it from orbit. "It's the only way to be sure."

"Since you leave at 4:30, just get the imaging started and let it run. I'll have Chris finish it up on Monday since you and I are both WFH then."

Of course the bitch shows up late—without the power brick. "Don't you have any spares?" she asked. "Not for that model, and it takes a very specific wattage."

I could almost hear her mutter "Fuck me" under her breath as she went back upstairs to retrieve the power brick. She returned several minutes later with her docking station and it's power brick (which has a barrel-type connector and not a USB-C). "Weren't you given a separate power brick to carry with you when you take this home?" "No, I just take the dock home with me."

Well, fuck me. These Dell 5570s require a special 130-watt brick, and while I had one, it was already in use imaging a different 5570. I told her thank you and said I would make it work.

She walked off and I interrupted the other image process and used the power supply on this machine. I recoiled when opening the lid; it was another one of those laptops that had obviously been used at home as an impromptu Hor d'oeuvres tray. Out came canned air and the Clorox wipes.

At this point it was nearly 4:30 and I knew I wouldn't be getting out of there any time soon. I plugged the rest of the connectors in and booted into the USB stick that would connect to the imaging server and start the process. I was inputting the required information and realized she hadn't left her password and I didn't know if she'd run the backup script that stores all her data and settings from the machine on her network share. So I backed out, rebooted, and logged in with my credentials to see if she had the script on her desktop; that would tell me she'd done it.

Simultaneously I texted my boss and asked if he'd backed her up when he was working on this and he said he had, but that he had to direct everything to her OneDrive because she didn't have a network share.

"Why does that set all my alarm bells off?" I asked.

"There's a copy of the backup folder on the c-drive as well," he said.

Yeah, but if I wipe and reimage the machine that will disappear as well.

So I went back to my own laptop and created a network share for this bitch (because that's where the restore script will pull from, not some nebulous place on her OneDrive) and physically copied the contents of that c-drive backup folder over to it.

It took nearly 30 minutes. Nearly 60 gigabytes worth of crap. Yeah, she's one of our engineers so she has every program under the sun installed—and because she had no network share, all that data was stored locally, but she is also one of these folks who seems to think her workstation is also her personal computer. Yeah, I saw lots of file names flash by during the transfer of things that should definitely not be on a work computer.

At around 5 pm the transfer was complete. I power cycled the computer and booted into the USB stick. About four steps in, I realized that I'd mistyped the computer name. This is something that could've been "fixed in post" as they say, but it was easier to do it then before the process started.

Except…while I could click on the clear-field button, now I wasn't able to type anything new into the name field. I thought that was odd, so I backed out to the previous step and tried again. Same thing happened. I powered down completely and powered the machine back up. I pressed F12 to get into the startup options menu to select the USB stick and…nothing. The machine booted into the previously installed O/S. After trying this several times, it wouldn't even get that far, giving me the message "Something went wrong," and gave me the dreaded blue screen. I rebooted again. Still no response from the keyboard.

Fuck. Me. The damn keyboard had died or fried—probably from one of the dozens of crumbs that I had removed.

By this point it was past 5:20 pm, and already physically spent, I said to hell with it and powered it down. Bitch ain't gonna get it back on Monday, that's for sure. I packed up, got the hell outta there and then hit 15 out of 18 stop lights red on the commute home. Because of course.

 

Three more years. Just keep telling yourself it's only three more years until retirement.

You may have noticed that the blog has been relatively quiet this week.

On Monday (one of my two weekly work from home days) I was greeted by this email from my immediate supervisor:

Fellas, this week might be a bit challenging as I will be out of the office starting tomorrow for shoulder surgery and B. is out the whole week with some personal health and some significant primary residence issues.  It would be best if you guys could come into the office as much as possible this week so we have in office coverage.  I will ask L. to send out an email to staff about limited IT support this week but I'll let you guys coordinate what you can on in office coverage for what works best for you two.  Definitely going to need you both to step up a bit more this week while we are so limited on team resources and staff being out.

Mark, you will be in charge of all desktop support and coverage tasking C. where and when you need assistance for things you need help on (F. may be able to assist on some things as well, just communicate any needs clearly).  C. has a very full plate too with coverage on projects and application/system support (SharePoint SPO migration for August go live is a big one) F. can also provide support with communication and follow through on SPO and other things as they come up.  Just keep her posted on what you need help with. 

C. will be in charge this week and I have delegated control to him for while I will be out. FYI  please check in with C. for all supervisory matters while I'm out of the office, as he is the boss this week.

If anything major comes up or you have issues anywhere please keep L. in the loop and she will give guidance on how to proceed or handle.

We all have our professional crosses to bear, and B. has been mine—especially over the last few months.

Since May, he has taken a two week vacation (because apparently his adult daughter is incapable of driving across country by herself), returned to work for a week, followed by another two week vacation "building a deck" for said daughter in Florida, followed by one week back at work, and lastly followed by yet another week-long vacation spent on a cruise. Each of those vacations were augmented by a spur-of-the-moment extra day tacked on one or both ends of his official time off.

We're a small team, and when even one of us is gone, it affects all of us. But with B. being gone for these extended periods, and now, most recently gone cruising for a week followed by yet another week-long absence has left me stressed to the point where I know I will be getting sick—for realz—sometime within the next week. I know that simply because I know how my body deals with this kind of stress.

We normally have about 50 work-in-progress tickets on any given day, constantly churning as some are knocked out only to be replaced by new ones. Some are easy and some require more expertise than just any one of us on our own possesses.

This past week, the ticket count has been consistently hovering over 120, with fully half of those open or not even acknowledged because we simply do not have the manpower.

Even before the clusterfuck that B's serial vacations created, it was commonly acknowledged that we needed at least more more technician, but what did they do? They hired a fucking project manager (F. in the email from my boss) who doesn't have anything to do with the day-to-day operations of I.T. in our department.

Adding to the clusterfuck that was this past week, after a period of six months where we were unable to order any new equipment from Dell because of contract issues, everything was resolved and the backlog of requests were finally ordered and they started pouring in over the past three weeks. Everything's been sitting in our lab awaiting imaging and deployment because, again—we don't have the manpower to deal with any of it.

So midweek, someone in their infinite wisdom decided to call upon the talents of a not-official-but-knows-I.T. person working in another division in our department to help with the imaging of the equipment since I—who usually handle this task—was absolutely inundated with trouble tickets and break/fix requests.

Okay, the guy may know I.T. stuff, but he didn't know how we did things, so an entire day was spent—pulled away from the tasks that were already bearing down on me—to get him up to speed on how we got equipment ready to go out. Every task in the process was met with a question. And when he wasn't questioning why something was done in a particular manner, he was just constantly trying to engage me in pointless conversation.

LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE TO CONCENTRATE ON MY OWN WORK YOU CUNT!

"You don't look good in an orange jumpsuit…you don't look good in an orange jumpsuit…you don't look good in an orange jumpsuit…" became my mantra this week.

If all this weren't enough, it seemed that even the most basic of procedures—things that would normally take a few moments at most to accomplish—were taking hours because nothing was working.

I found myself uttering, "because of course it doesn't" or "because of course it does" more times than I care to mention.

Wednesday I came home and did something I haven't done for more than a decade. I sat on the sofa, chatted with Ben for a few minutes and then went upstairs and crashed. I slept until around 9:30 when I got up, came back downstairs, ate a bowl of cereal, and went back to bed for the night an hour later.

Both my boss and B. have been curiously silent in our group chat this week, and at this point I won't be the least bit surprised if we get another email on Monday telling us that he and B. are both going to be out for another week. I took my laptop home this afternoon and will be treating Monday as a WFH day—just like this past week—even if that dreaded email arrives.

We've had a new middle manager for less than a year. She came from another division, where she had been working as a senior Desktop Tech. Why they hired her is beyond me, because she is so obviously in over her head it ceased being funny about two weeks after she assumed command.

Micro-managing is her modus operandi, and my immediate supervisor (he reports to her) has had to tell her to back off several times; that we are his team (she oversees two teams in our department) and it is not her job to direct our daily activities.

I started referring to her privately as Elphaba several months ago. [The name is more indicative of The Wizard of Oz than of Wicked, BTW.]

Since before the lockdown there were plans to expand and reorganize our work area. All of that got put on hold during the pandemic, but now that we're all back in the office (in my team's case, three days a week), apparently it's now time to do this. I'm not thrilled about the reconfiguration because I'm currently tucked away in a spot between a column and a window that overlooks the street below. It's cozy, it's quiet, I'm not immediately visible the minute you walk in the department, and the location allows me a degree of privacy to work without unnecessary interruption since we get a lot of walk-ups and drive-by users who—no matter how many times we tell them—are incapable of understanding the concept that we need a ticket from the Service Desk to do anything, thinking that if they pay a personal visit it will drive home how important their particular issue is.

Anyhow, we got an email from Elphaba early last week (names redacted to protect the innocent) that went something like this:

Hello IT Team,

I have an update on the schedule and the arrangements I have shared earlier in my email below on 6/2/22.

Goodmans are still scheduled to perform the work on Thursday June 23rd, however they will take longer than just a day and need to start the prep work a day earlier. So the new schedule for this work is from next Wednesday June 22^nd till the following Monday June 27^th. During that time, we only need 1 person from the IT team to be working in the office, at a temp cubicle outside of [Director]'s office, it is [Programmer who is no longer with the enterprise]'s old cubicle (her name plate is still on it).

On the day of the 21st:

We need to disconnect all devices within the IT area and pack all items in boxes and move them to the south west conference room by [Director]'s Office.

[Immediate supervisor] you can pack your stuff on the 17^th before you go on vacation and put the boxes in my office if you like, or you can keep them in the vacant cubicle in your [Remote programmer]'s area  and we will move them with everything else to the south west conference room on the 21st.

[Colleague #1] since you telework on Tuesdays, you can pack on Friday the 17^th as well, as Monday the 20^th is a Holiday.

Mark and [Colleague #2], you are scheduled to work in the office and will pack your stuff before you leave for the day.

On the day of the 22nd:

We have [Immediate supervisor] out of the office (on vacation)

Mark is teleworking

[Colleague #1] and [Colleague #2] are scheduled to work in the office. I want to ask [Colleague #1] to telework on that day, and [Colleague #2] to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day.

On the day of the 23rd:

We have [Immediate supervisor] out of the office (on vacation)

[Colleague #2] and [Colleague #1] are teleworking

Mark is scheduled to work in the office to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day while Goodmans are working.

 On the day of the 24th:

We have [Immediate supervisor] out of the office (on vacation)

[Colleague #2] is teleworking

Mark and [Colleague #1] are scheduled to work in the office. I want to ask Mark to telework on that day, and [Colleague #1] to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day.

On the day of the 27th:

We have [Colleague #2] out of the office (on vacation)

[Immediate supervisor] and Mark are teleworking

[Colleague #1] is scheduled to work in the office to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day.

On the day of the 28th:

We need to bring everything back and unpack our stuff and reconnect all devices.

Mark and [Immediate supervisor] will be working in the office that day and will be moving everything back to the NEW IT area.

[Colleague #1] can connect his devices on the next day Wednesday the 29th.

[Colleague #2] can connect his devices after he is back from his vacation on Tuesday July 5th.

If any of the details provided above is changed I will update you. If you have any questions please let me know.

Because apparently we are incapable of orchestrating this incredibly difficult bit of logistics ourselves…

After I finished reading this, my initial reaction was to text my supervisor who was sitting about fifteen feet away—and based on his facial expression had also just read the email. My first impulse was to say, "I'm sure she had a wet spot on her seat when she finished writing that," but it would've been wildly inappropriate even for me (and I'm not known among my colleagues for mincing words). Instead, I just wrote, "Would it be unprofessional if I just responded, Whatever."?

He said that yes, yes it would be.

So instead I just responded to the email with, "Acknowledged."

I do not like being back in the office. To minimize my possible exposure to the Covid, I am isolated from the few people who also have to physically be present within these walls, but that's not really the issue. What has sent me into a tailspin this week is the frustration I'm feeling at this whole process that I have to physically be present for. I suppose it's at least partly my own fault, setting up what I see now was an entirely unrealistic expectation that somehow I'd be able to crank out 150 (now mysteriously increased to over 200) machines in one week and be back in the safety of my own home thereafter.

But alas, that was not meant to be. An entire day was wasted because none of the jacks in the lab were live. Makes it hard to talk to the server that's serving up the images to be laid down on the machines. While waiting,  I went ahead and hooked up eight laptops to the switch and power strip—only to be informed once the jacks were live that I was now supposed to concentrate on getting the tablets out first. So everything had to be disconnected.

The image for the tablets had problems with the audio driver. Not insurmountable; I could always manually install it after the fact, but it was just one more roadblock that stood in the way of me getting back home. So I went ahead and prepped 10 tablets for our field workers, and as I was getting ready to provide the cellular info to our phone person…discovered these tablets had been ordered without any cellular capability. "Oh, we'll have to get with Emily to see if she has any cell-equipped tablets we can swap these out for."

So another day wasted. "Go ahead and start the laptops until we get the other tablets."

(It turns out that none of the tablets that were ordered came with cellular. Go figger.)

The laptop image was completely fucked. The guy who builds the images was fucking around with the image and uploading it to the server while I was downloading them. (Of course I didn't know this until the whole process hung and reached out to him to find out what the FUCK was going on.)

"Go ahead and start over. I made some changes to the audio drivers on both the laptops and the tablets."

The laptops ran through the install process…and then would hang when rebooting. Consistently.

Meanwhile there's all this pressure coming down from my supervisor wondering how soon they can start rolling these out. (Thankfully I'm not involved in that process.)

There seems to be a lot going on behind the scenes that I'm not privy to. As I wrote earlier, we've been without a department supervisor for a month now, and the woman who is reluctantly acting as "interim" supervisor is a micromanaging [fill in appropriate descriptive word of your choosing].

For the life of me, I do not understand the urgency at getting this equipment out. Everyone has been doing just fine with the machines main ITS gave out back in May, so I simply don't get why this has suddenly become a hair-on-fire emergency to get all the desktops swapped out with portable devices right now. It's not like there's going to be a cost savings on VPN licensing or anything.

So as of today I'm still dead in the water with the laptops. The audio driver issue with the tablets still hasn't been fully resolved, but a manual uninstall and reinstall seems to take care of it. I had been simply joining the machines to the domain and adding the various administrative accounts to the machine before handing them off to my colleagues, but after today's barely tolerable department meeting I said fuck it and decided to do it the right way, and went back to doing the "normal" amount of post-imaging work (installing specific applications, etc.) before passing them on. It slows the process down a bit, but at least I know they're going out the door with everything installed and working the way it should be. I'll not have us being accused of rushing crap out the door the way main ITS was back in May. (Things that still aren't working because they're locked down and they refuse to give us admin rights on the machines so we can—you know—actually fix their messes.)

My mood improved somewhat this afternoon when I finally accepted that conservatively, I was probably going to be going into the office for the next month at least, even though we are still on work-from-home orders until mid October. Of course with Governor Douchebag opening up the entire state again, who knows if I'll ever be working from home again.

https://twitter.com/voenixrising/status/994660346009862144

I've worked other places where I barely tolerated some of my coworkers (cough, DISH, cough), but I can't honestly say I absolutely despised the lot of them the way I do at my current job. Granted, I have never worked for a government agency before, so maybe ineptitude and sloth are just business as usual and what's expected, but the arrogance that some of these people throw while not doing their jobs is just infuriating.

Paranoia runs rampant. I have written before about one of the techs I work with who keeps paper records of everything she does for fear of being reprimanded for not having answers if questions come up regarding any particular task she may have worked on and ironically is—for lack of a better term—a corporate tattletale. I'm convinced it was her running back to our boss that got two contract techs fired last year for the most innocuous reasons.

As if I needed any more proof of her proclivities, the other day she came back from lunch and couldn't wait to tell me about a homeless woman she saw at the local Circle K who was filling up an empty soda bottle from the soda machine and muching down on taquitos while she did it—and how my coworker then ran to the clerk (who has hip deep in customers at the time) and interrupted everything to tell her about it.

Okay, it is petty theft, but couldn't you have just walked away without saying anything?

Apparently not.

And then there's the other guy I work directly with. He's reasonably friendly, but some days gives me attitude for no reason at all. Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, buddy? His queue isn't any worse than mine, yet he disappears for hours every. single. day.

Don't get me started on our Network Security and Networking groups. They have everything so fucking locked down that in many cases we don't have the rights to effectively do our jobs. I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO TAKE A MACHINE OFF THE DOMAIN IN ORDER TO INSTALL A PIECE OF SOFTWARE THAT OUR OWN APPLICATION PEOPLE WROTE!! "Installation of this software is blocked by network policy" or "A referral has been returned by the server."

It's just ridiculous.